In another world I am kneeling
on the shore coughing up black
tar from the ridges of my throat

and in another world my body
is not a weapon nor an opening nor
something to be mapped and mounted,

a skinless summit, a colonization
that seeps into the rocky river bed
as the sun paints me in waves of sand

and sea foam. In another world my body
is not a gun, and I do not care what the reader
thinks of all my violence, the blood

beneath my fingernails that holds no DNA.
In other worlds my brothers are not
halved, nor am I, nor is their such vastness

between us, and the sunlight we have known
is not a cliche, and these words mean
something I can explain and know.